Introducing Scaleway NextGen NVMe Cloud Servers with Hot-Snapshots

Two years ago, in March 2016, we launched the first generation of Start Cloud Servers on Scaleway. The adoption was just crazy and we struggled to follow demand since then. On the user side, the experience might have been deceptive while we faced organisational and technical issues to properly scale as demand increased. On the business side, metrics were growing correctly and we were able to raise strategic investments, which we announced back in November, to solve our stock issues, release new products and expand globally.

Today, we are proud to announce our NextGen Start NVMe Cloud Servers and the release of a long awaited feature: Hot-Snapshots.
These new servers offer up to 50% per core performance increase and are backed by blazing fast NVMe SSD disk.

This new generation of Start Server starts at only €1.99 per month with up to 8 cores and 8GB per server:

Start1-xs

Start1-s

Start1-m

Start1-l

Cores

1

2

4

8

RAM

1GB

2GB

4GB

8GB

SSD

25GB

50GB

100GB

200GB

Bandwidth

100Mbit/s

200Mbit/s

300Mbit/s

400Mbit/s

Hourly price

€0.004

€0.008

€0.016

€0.032

Monthly price

€1.99

€3.99

€7.99

€15.99

These servers are once again designed by our own Electronic Labs, providing insane performance for only €1.99 per month.
The NVMe SSDs provide incredible latencies with an amazing amount of IOPS.
The new generation is also backed by DDR4 ECC memory providing twice the memory bandwidth of the previous generation.

Hot Snapshot Public Preview

We are glad to announce the preview availability of Hot Snapshots.

Hot Snapshots are now available on all Virtual Cloud servers to create point-in-time backups of your volumes while your server is running. Hot Snapshots allow you to backup your volume while your server is running and easily spawn new servers using the snapshot as the base image. Data recovery is now easier than ever.

Hot Snapshots are charged like cold snapshots, you will pay €0.50 per 25GB of Snapshot data per month or €0.001 per hour.

As the feature is just coming out of our Labs and to control load, you will need to explicitly request access to it through our support team for now. Simply create a ticket asking to enable Hot Snapshots and we will enable it for you.

To do a Hot Snapshot of all the volumes of your server, simply execute scw commit <server_name> with the Scaleway CLI or use the web interface to do it!

We're also working on a recurrent backup feature to be released during next weeks.

Custom Kernels, Security Groups Live Reload, ImageHub, Packer

Naming convention update

To improve readability of our products, we have renamed our cloud servers product families. Cloud Compute Servers are now composed of 3 families:

Start: Our NextGen NVMe Cloud servers.

Pro: All workload intensive servers.

Arm: All ARMv8 servers.

Upgrading VC1 servers and End Of Sales

We want to thank all our early adopters who selected the VC1 servers since two years.

All VC1 users can upgrade to Start servers without any price change.

To upgrade your existing VC1 server, simply do a power off and a power on your server. Your server will start on a Next-Gen Start Hypervisor with increased performances and for the same price as before. You may already be running on a new hypervisor if you created your server recently. New hypervisors are powered by Intel Denverton CPUs instead of Avoton.

We will stop selling the first generation of Start Cloud Server and block the creation of VC1 servers the 31st of May. All applications depending of automated creation need to be upgraded to use our new server generation.

Getting started

To deploy one of our new Start server, simply select it on the server creation page, click start and your server will be ready in less than a minute!

As usual, you can automate the deployment of your new servers using the API or any scaleway compatible projet. Starting a new server with the Scaleway CLI is a one line command, run scw run --commercial-type=START-1M ubuntu-bionic, wait a minute and your server is up and running!

If you need more server than your account limits currently allows, simply open a support ticket, our support team will take care of increasing your server quota.